Electronic devices, in particular, portable or mobile electronic devices, are becoming increasingly popular and equipped with diverse functionalities. For example, phone devices such as mobile phones, smart phones, landline phones, VoIP phones, and all manner of fixed and mobile telecommunications devices, media players, and gaming devices, which are now in wide-spread use, are becoming “multifunctional devices” that have cameras, text messaging capability, Internet browsing capability, electronic mail capability, video playback capability, audio playback capability, image display capability, phone capability and so forth. Typically, such multifunctional devices interact with a user with one or more graphic user interface (GUI) screens with objects (e.g., icons and menu options) to allow a user to use the various features of the multifunctional devices.
However, as electronic devices become more compact and provide more diverse functionalities, it is very common that a user has to go through more GUI menu options to select the functionality that the user wishes to perform at the moment. For example, if a mobile phone user wants to make a call to a friend while the user is using the device to browse the Internet, the user typically needs to close or minimize the browser application, find a GUI object (such as phonebook or call log) to start a search for contact information, enter a character or phone number for a search query, and select a menu or press a button to obtain search results (e.g., a list of contact information). The user must then select an item from the search results to make a phone call. This is very tedious, time consuming and inconvenient to the device user. For another example, if a device user wants to find a text message from a friend while an email application is running on a mobile phone, the user must navigate through several steps to return to a main menu, and then find and launch a GUI object associated with the text message box.
Accordingly, there is a need for a simple and efficient way to search for a desired application or information without going through several menu/button manipulations.